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It’s more than fair to say that, once again, the Royal Theater is not in line for a Preservation Achievement Award. (Nominations for 2013 are due this week to the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia.) At this stage of the game, after languishing for 43 years, pretty much only wreckage remains behind the façade of the South Street institution that opened in 1920 and closed in 1970.

The entire South Street corridor had fallen victim to the proposed Crosstown Expressway. That ill-conceived and controversial project would eventually be removed from the city plan. But while blocks of South Street nearest the neighborhoods of Society Hill and Washington Square benefited from their proximity to revival and investment, those nearer to Broad Street would continue to decline. For the Royal Theater, high hopes wouldn’t be enough to overcome decade after decade of false starts, neglect and vandalism.

Today, what remains of the Royal Theater’s exterior is a handsome façade that’s little more than a canvas for murals echoing fifty years of faded memory. From the 1920s through the 40s, the Royal called itself “America’s Finest Colored Photoplay House” and hosted live performances with Bessie Smith, Cab Calloway, Fats Waller, Pearl Bailey and Count Basie. That was then. What remains inside now is damaged almost beyond recognition, a hardhat site for even the most hopeful displays of hipster creative culture.

Decades of optimism, good will, vision and nostalgia have kept a dream alive, though they haven’t added up to enough to wake the Royal Theater from its longtime coma. Money might have made a difference. And great sums were lined up to arrive for the Royal revival at the end of Rendell’s second term as Governor. Just a few years ago, this project promised a haul of $31 million from Harrisburg for music producer-turned developer Kenny Gamble to create the “Royal Theater and Universal Commercial Complex.”

Funding can do a lot, but in the end, money is not fungible with well-earned, authentic preservation success. We sometimes convince ourselves to the contrary, but money is no substitute for community.

Community is what made the Royal an original and enviable success. Three-quarters of a century ago, when photographer Wenzel J. Hess visited 15th and South Streets, the Royal Theater stood at the heart of a vibrant, thriving community. The glue that worked for the Royal Theater was the same glue that held together all of the other enterprises on that stretch of South Street: drug stores, hardware stores, pawnshops, diners and Chop Suey joints, dentists, tailors, barbers, bicycle shops and bars. It was about life—the lives of the folks who made  this community and the places they lived them. People and community made South Street. And when  community declined, so did the possibility of preservation success for the Royal Theater.

The inevitable has been coming, if in slow motion. Twenty-one years ago (1992) The Philadelphia Inquirer reports the Royal’s owner is seeking a demolition permit. Five years later (1997) the city Law Department sets out to sue that same owner for code violations that allowed the building to deteriorate. The following year (1998) the Preservation Alliance acquires the building to buy more time but sells the building two years later with no preservation guarantees. And two years ago, the Alliance puts the Royal Theater on its “Endangered Properties List” as the owner considers demolition and then, last year, possible sale.

How long are the statutes of limitations for wishful thinking? If this slow-motion slipping into oblivion continues for another seven years, the Royal Theater will have been empty and abandoned as long as it was open and thriving. Maybe that’s long enough to find a new reality.

Jean-Pierre Blanchard wanted to make a splash, figuratively, not literally. He arrived  from France, 220 years ago, planning a display of showmanship that would, if successful, be the first balloon ascension in America—and his 45th.

On January 9, 1793, the French aeronaut and inventor readied his balloon in the prison yard at 6th and Walnut Streets, accepted best wishes from President George Washington and other luminaries, and floated skyward. Blanchard metaphorically lived his motto: Sic itur ad astra—to the stars. More precisely, he went to Deptford, New Jersey.

If not made useful, such feats of technology, skill, daring and luck were of little value. Blanchard made use of his time aloft conducting a variety of measurements and experiments, the results of which were recorded in a small book published in Philadelphia with a pleasant illustration of his balloon. Engravings were all they had in Blanchard’s time; it would be nearly half a century before photography allowed aeronauts to dream of returning to earth with “you-are-there” documentation.

“The first successful aerial photographs in America,” taken above Boston in 1860, were made from Samuel A. King’s balloon, the “Queen of the Air.” And President Lincoln’s war machine soon put aerial photography to work against Confederate troops. But King didn’t much care for sharing his basket with photographers. Another three decades passed before he went aloft with Philadelphia photographer William Nicholson Jennings.

In the early 1890s, King, brought the “Eagle Eyrie” up from his home in Tinicum to Fairmount Park for annual July 4th ascensions. In 1934, Jennings reminisced about their partnership in “Snapshots from Cloudland,” published in the Journal of the Franklin Institute.

As King prepped, Jennings found a moment to approach “the genial aeronaut to make a bid for a place in the basket for the purpose of making aerial snapshots.” King stared back “with an eye blue as the sky he loved to sail in; stroked his long beard, fleecy as any cloud he had passed through, and remarked: ‘My charge for a passenger is fifty dollars; but if you expect to make good photographs on your first balloon trip … you will be wasting your time and money.’” A first-time passenger would succumb to nerves and produce double exposures, blurred images, use erroneous settings, and on top of all of that, the summer’s “blue haze between balloon and landscape” would result in “thin,” “washy” negatives. Plus, King added, “escaping coal gas from the balloon would create a chemical fog.”

Undeterred, Jennings conducted experiments from the top of the Washington, Monument and devised a combination of orthochromatic plates and a light yellow lens filters and got him “bright, snappy” negatives. He made a “gas-tight” camera, and showed both to King.

On the Fourth of July, 1893, as “the Municipal Band struck up ‘My Sweetheart’s the Man in the Moon,’ all Jennings had to do was to “forget nerves, wait until the desired section of landscape came into view” hold his breath and press the button.” He “made several exposures while passing over Philadelphia at the height of about a mile…securing sharp, crisp, clear-cut negatives, from which I afterward made a number of 40” x 50” enlargements for exhibition at the Crystal Palace, London.”

King and Jennings would continue to collaborate, but their demise (King in 1914; Jennings in 1946) would hardly mark the end of the Philadelphia balloon story.

In 1956, when Hollywood adapted Jules Verne’s 1873 novel, Around the World in Eighty Days, producer Mike Todd lined up an all-star cast including David Niven and the young Shirley McLaine. The film, which won an Academy Award for Best Picture, also featured appearances by Noel Coward, Buster Keaton, Peter Lorre, Red Skelton, Marlene Dietrich and Frank Sinatra. For the all-important role of the balloon, Todd turned to his friend; the self-described Philadelphia “balloonatic” Constance Wolf, who lent  her beloved “La Coquette.” The first woman to cross the Alps in a balloon, Wolf would promote the film by piloting “La Coquette” over London and Paris after its release. No surprise that, in 1959, she would replicate Blanchard’s first American ascension, and would inflate “La Coquette” again for another re-enactment, seen here, in January 1968.

Admission cost a dime at the 9^th and Arch Museum. Indeed, dimes ruled the for-profit world of Victorian-era museums.  But in the end neither the entertainment, nor the dimes, were enough.

For more than half a century, the corner of 9^th and Arch sustained Philadelphians with opportunities for diversion, education and voyeurism. The public came and went—and so did the owners. First was Colonel Joseph Wood, fresh in town having been burnt out of his Chicago emporium. The Colonel opened the doors on a relatively simple affair: menagerie plus performance space. By 1883, the venue re-launched under the new ownership. Hagar, Campbell & Co. Dime Museum advertised “Entertainment Designed Expressly for Ladies and Children,” and claimed they had the “only great show in town.” It featured everything from “Barnum’s Original Aztecs,” the “Che-Mah Chinese Dwarf,” the “Cannibal Fan Child,” the “Living Skeleton” and “the “White Moor.” Hagar and Campbell piled on the attractions, adding “Dens of Serpents,” “the Merry Monkeys” and Punch and Judy, Johnson’s Original Tennessee Jubilee Singers, and “a multitude of other attractions.”  (.pdf)

Even so, audience demands, and museum costs, proved too high. The Dime Museum soon changed hands again. This time, Charles A. Bradenbaugh re-invented the destination as the “9^th and Arch Museum.” And this time, place and the public connected. Bradenbaugh kept the audiences coming from 1885 to 1910.

What would a visitor see behind Bradenbaugh’s colorful façade? “On the first floor,” Joseph Jackson tells us, “there were numerous forms of apparatus for testing grips, lungs, lifting power, etc. “On the second floor were cages of monkeys, a prairie dog ‘Village,’ and a few other menagerie specimens.”  The third floor provided a lecture hall packed with a series of platforms, with living “human freaks.” Regulars came to know “The Skeleton Man,” “The Fat Woman,” the “Real Zulus,” “The Human Bat,” “The Bearded Lady,” “The Elastic-Skin Man,” “The Glass Eater,” and “The Dog-Faced Boy.” Every hour, the gawking public would be invited back down to the main auditorium where they’d sit for a popular play that, no matter the length of the original, was condensed into forty minutes, give or take.

In the 1890s, Bradenbaugh dabbled in movies, allowing his visitors to enjoy that emerging medium. But the Dime Museum’s array of 19^th-century offerings remained a complicated and layered activity for the public. The simpler experience of the 20^th century movie house required, and got, a venue all its own.

A decade into the new century, Bradenbaugh saw the writing on the wall and sold out. Soon enough, the new owners of the 9th and Arch Museum recognized the same reality and did their best to turn it into an opportunity. In 1911, the museum’s new manager, T.F. Hopkins, and his press agent, Norman Jeffries, engineered (literally) a favorite local legend: the Jersey Devil.

After giving birth to her 12^th child, the story goes, “Mother Leeds” declared that the 13^th, if she had it, would be the Devil. Lo and behold, one dark and stormy night in 1735, Mrs. Leeds gave birth to her 13^th. As promised, it immediately transformed into “a creature with hooves, a horse’s head, bat wings and a forked tail.” The newborn “growled and screamed, then killed the midwife before flying up the chimney. It circled the villages and headed toward the Pines.”

According to Andrea Stulman Dennett in Weird & Wonderful: the Dime Museum in America, the headlines screamed: “The Fabulous Leeds Devil Reappears after an Absence of Fifty Years.” A “monster with long hind legs, short forelegs, a tail, horns on its head and short wings” had reportedly been captured by a farmer in New Jersey “after a terrific struggle” and would soon be “placed on exhibition at the Ninth and Arch Museum.”

“Caught!!!  And Here!!!!  Alive!!! THE LEEDS DEVIL, read Hopkins and Jeffries posters. “Swims! Flys! Gallops! … Exhibited securely chained in a Massive Steel Cage. A LIVING DRAGON more famous than the Fabled Monsters of Mythology. Don’t Miss the Sight of a Lifetime.”

In fact, the museum’s short-lived center of attention was a kangaroo with wings attached. And the audiences this mutant marsupial drew to 9^th and Arch kept the doors open for only a few more weeks. The day of the Dime Museum had passed. Frank Dumont soon bought the building for his thriving troupe of minstrels.

A century before one of the last gasps of American blackface minstrelsy played out at the corner of 9^th and Arch Streets, Philadelphia lawyer-turned-cartoonist Edward Williams Clay pioneered his art of stoking white ridicule. Clay’s racist “Life in Philadelphia” caricatures targeting  African Americans quickly grew into an international success. And while Clay was adding insult to injustice in Philadelphia, white actor and playwright Thomas D. Rice adopted African-American vernacular speech, song and dance to build audiences in New York. In both cases, and during the very same years, art appropriated, exaggerated,  entertained, and suppressed. Blackface minstrelsy was born.

“Minstrelsy is the one American form of amusement, purely our own,” wrote a proud Frank Dumont in 1899. “It has lived and thrived even though the plantation darkey, who first gave it a character, has departed.” Dumont’s career in minstrelsy before the Civil War culminated by the turn of the century with two off-stage achievements: the  publication of his Witmark Amateur Minstrel Guide and Burnt Cork Encyclopedia, and a massive scrapbook now at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (.pdf finding aid). Dumont’s troupe then performed at the Eleventh Street Opera House, near Ranstead Street. By 1911, when Dumont’s name had become synonymous with blackface minstrelsy, he relocated to Ninth and Arch.

Dumont learned how to keep his material fresh with monologues, sketches and burlesques adapted to “current fads and follies.” His “Scenes at Wanamaker’s,” “Broad Street Station,” “Atlantic City Storms,” and “The Trolley Car Party” allowed audiences to mock themselves and, with the help of blackface minstrelsy, to mock others.

How, exactly, did Dumont’s Minstrels “black up” for every show? One evening, Dumont allowed a reporter to witness the nightly ritual. A written account made its way into Dumont’s Burnt Cork Encyclopedia (and this photograph made its way into the archives at Temple University):

Make a paste of burnt cork and water and take some, “into your left hand, rub it over the palms as if about to wash your face; then smear it over the features as if applying a cosmetic. Carefully apply it around the eyes and about the lips … when you have applied the cork and left the lips in the natural condition, they will appear red to the audience. Comedians leave a wider, white margin all around the lips. This will give it the appearance of a large mouth, and will look red to the spectator.”

Readers of The Burnt Cork Encyclopedia did exactly that and followed Dumont’s stage instructions and scripts for burlesques he shared on the following pages. They became proficient lightening eyebrows with chalk, affixing woolen chin whiskers and finishing off their stage faces with “large brass rimmed spectacles” on their blackened noses.

With the face complete, Dumont continued: “I take a small soft brush…to rub off the particles of cork from my features to prevent them from falling on my white shirt front and white vest …I put on my creamy white shirt… a paper or celluloid collar, a small black tie… my white vest… my swallow-tail coat with a flashy flower or ‘boutonniere’ in its lapel and I resemble a perfect Beau Brummel.… We wear black satin knee pants, black stockings and low cut patent leather shoes. This is very genteel, dressing and in keeping with minstrelsy.”

Also in keeping with the minstrelsy was the nightly ritual of removing the costume, and the burnt cork. “No hard rubbing is necessary. Plenty of lather and a sponge. Then go over the face once more and … rinse your ‘features’ in a bucket of fresh water—if you can get it—and once more you are a Caucasian ready to take up the ‘white man’s burden’…”

Frank Dumont died in 1919, at work in his box office at 9^th and Arch. Dumont’s Theater went up for sale in 1928 and burned in 1929. Live blackface minstrelsy on stage in Philadelphia had come to an end, although the screen version, thanks to Hollywood, was only getting started. Philadelphia’s mummer tradition of “blacking up” would continue until 1964, when the courts finally declared that the practice had, after nearly a century and a half, finally run its racist course.

“Bands, crowds, spectacles, chevrons and gold lace, brass hats, officials, politicians and dignitaries and still just a football game,” wrote Paul Gallico in the days leading up to the annual Army-Navy game the Saturday after Thanksgiving in 1934. “Of all the thousands of football games played all over the country from October to December, this is the one game that really matters…”

“Borries and Buckler, two star backs, are playing their final game and both should throw a party worth attending,” read folks as far away as Los Angeles. The day before the game, Gallico urged ticket-holders to “take a look at Midshipman [Buzz] Borries tomorrow as he fades back to make a pass. Note how cool and unflustered he is; how with a quick glance he takes in the situation and adapts himself to it immediately. Ten years from now, Borries will be a commander, perhaps in charge of a destroyer, or a sub, or a nest of war birds.”

The game took place midway between West Point and Annapolis, in Philadelphia, but the game-day scene unfolded in Washington, D.C. as “seven special trains pulled out from Union Station at an early hour carrying hundreds of members of Capital society, clad in… their best furs and smartest sports clothes… women wearing either the navy’s yellow chrysanthemums tied with huge blue bows, or the Army’s knots of black, gray and gold.”

Franklin Field couldn’t begin to accommodate all of those who wanted in. Leading up to the game, according to The New York Times, 40,000 were turned away. With all 78,079 tickets sold, prices “rocketed to $40, $50 and $75 a pair, as scalpers began to infest cigar stores, shoe-shine parlors and restaurants.”

After all the anticipation, excitement and expense, the final score had Navy on top by 3, a single field goal kicked by “Big Slade Cutter, the Middie’s right tackle.” Did a mere 3-0 score dampen the day’s excitement? Not hardly, claimed Gallico, who wrote: “Of all the Army-Navy games I have seen this was by far the most beautiful and the most awesome.” And he wasn’t talking about the game.

“Wind and weather and nature set the scene,” Gallico wrote in an article titled “Weather on Parade at Big Service Game.” Here, “inside the giant fortress of the field, the entertainment was the “storm tortured sky to the west seen over the grim ramparts of the stadium…while to the east, the sun still sent slanting rays to the earth and illuminated the massed throngs in the east stand like a stage set lit by spotlights from the balcony.”

“With the first…dash of rain the massed thousands on the sides of the stadium turned themselves into a tapestry woven of colors as the women donned their colored rain capes against the downpour. Powder and marine blues were the prevailing colors, with sprinklings of reds, greens, yellows and whites. The west stands…resembled a tulip bed in Holland in springtime. The colors were so sharp and well defined.”

“There was one weird moment of flatness such as I have never seen before,” Gallico continued, “in which, due to the way the light struck from the storm overhead, and the mud that covered the football men from head to toe and rendered them all an even, ghostly grey, the whole scene resembled nothing so much as a photographic negative. Everything was inverted. Blacks were while, whites were blacks, and the gray men running on the field shining with mud and water looked like the negative film one sees run thorough in the cutting rooms of the newsreel studios.”

“Football in the mud is a much more fluid and rhythmic game to watch than on a dry field because …the 22 men do not come to a stop as abruptly as they do where the turf is solid and sure. The pileups dissolve in the grease and the ball carriers move to come sort of completion, either forward or backward, depending on how hard they are hit until they skid gently to a stop.  Blockers, too …slide gracefully on their chests for 5 and 6 yards at a clip… “

If you don’t believe Gallico (who quit sports writing two years later for a prolific and successful career as a novelist) see for yourself in this vintage video when Navy dragged Army through the mud—and vice versa.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zC6ggT4ByDs&w=550]

Weeks after Abraham Lincoln won the presidency on November 6, 1860, South Carolina seceded from the Union. And in the months before his inauguration in Washington, D.C. in March, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and Louisiana followed. Jefferson Davis would be elected and inaugurated as the Provisional President of the Confederacy.

A burdened Lincoln timed his trip to the Capital, and to his presidency, with a visit to Philadelphia on Washington’s birthday in 1861. At Independence Hall, he raised a flag with 34 stars, one for each recognized state plus a new one for the recently-admitted Kansas. And as he raised the flag that cold February day, Lincoln spoke of the nation’s dire situation:

“I am invited and called before you to participate in raising above Independence Hall the flag of our country, with an additional star upon it. I propose to say that when that flag was originally raised here it had but thirteen stars. . . . under the blessing of God, each additional star added to that flag has given additional prosperity and happiness to this country until it has advanced to its present condition; and its welfare in the future, as well as in the past, is in your hands. . . . I think we may promise ourselves that not only the new star placed upon that flag shall be permitted to remain there to our permanent prosperity for years to come, but additional ones shall from time to time be placed there . . .”

During his lifetime, Lincoln visited Philadelphia four times. And this visit on February 21-22, 1861 was by far the most meaningful. He arrived from New York via Newark and Trenton about 4PM on the 21^st to stay at the new Continental Hotel at 9^th and Chestnut Streets. There he talked with advisers about the rising tensions and learned of a newly-discovered assassination plot. The following morning, Lincoln went to Independence Hall to ceremoniously raise the nation’s new flag. He hadn’t prepared a speech but spoke to the issues of the day, and of his own demise:

“I am filled with deep emotion at finding myself standing here, in this place, where were collected together the wisdom, the patriotism, the devotion to principle, from which sprang the institutions under which we live. … in my hands is the task of restoring peace to the present distracted condition of the country. …  all the political sentiments I entertain have been drawn, so far as I have been able to draw them, from the sentiments which originated and were given to the world from this hall. I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence. I have often pondered over the dangers which were incurred by the men who assembled here, and framed and adopted that Declaration of Independence. I have pondered over the toils that were endured by the officers and soldiers of the army who achieved that Independence. … It was not the mere matter of the separation of the Colonies from the motherland; but that sentiment in the Declaration of Independence which gave liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but, I hope, to the world, for all future time. It was that which gave promise that in due time the weight would be lifted from the shoulders of all men. This is a sentiment embodied in the Declaration of Independence. Now, my friends, can this country be saved upon that basis? If it can, I will consider myself one of the happiest men in the world, if I can help to save it. If it cannot be saved upon that principle, it will be truly awful. But if this country cannot be saved without giving up that principle, I was about to say I would rather be assassinated on this spot than surrender it.”

Then Lincoln spoke clearly of the coming war:

“Now, in my view of the present aspect of affairs, there need be no bloodshed and war. There is no necessity for it. I am not in favor of such a course, and I may say, in advance, that there will be no bloodshed unless it be forced upon the Government, and then it will be compelled to act in self-defense.”

Lincoln turned to go to the platform outside on Chestnut Street, raised the 34-star flag and left for Washington, D.C. and his presidency. Before he arrived, Texas had voted to approve secession. Five weeks after his inauguration, Southern forces bombarded and captured Fort Sumter. The Civil War was underway.

Lincoln visited Philadelphia one more time—to support fundraising efforts for Army Hospitals in June, 1864. In another year, the assassinated President’s remains would ceremoniously, somberly return to Independence Hall to lay in state, before a final trip to Springfield, Illinois.

Philadelphia’s most effective tool in its industrial transformation during the late 19^th century wasn’t a tool at all, although it could be considered a machine for living. As architectural historian George Thomas put it, the rowhouse was “the quintessential object of Industrial Philadelphia.”

But the Philadelphia rowhouse had far older roots. In 1800, Scottish-born “architect and house-carpenter” Thomas Carstairs took the idea of a row and stretched it out for a full city block on Sansom between 7^th and 8^th Street, turning real estate into revenue and meeting the city’s ever-growing appetite for housing. Over the next several decades, as the city grew across its 17^th-century grid, the rowhouse evolved into an upscale solution for urban living. Architects John Haviland and Thomas U. Walter demonstrated how the repeated form could also become something chic and generous. But as the city’s population soared past one million in 1890, the rowhouse was effectively reclaimed for the working class. By the end of the century, Thomas writes, “as far as the eye could see, there were some fifty square miles of row houses and factories, most of which had been built in the previous generation.”

The two-and three-story rowhouse had become part the city’s successful mix of immigration, employment, coal, real estate and banking. Between 1887 and 1893, no fewer than 50,288 rowhouses were built, enough for a quarter million people. Rowhouse construction had seen a boom before, with more than 50,000 built between 1863 and 1876. But now, in the last decade of the 19^th century, the Philadelphia rowhouse had grown more compact, more simplified and even more adapted to the lives of  the working family. With the help Philadelphia’s 450 savings and loan associations, a two-story  “Workingman’s House,” as it became known, could be had for about $3,000 and paid off in about a decade.

Sure, other cities—New York, Boston, Brooklyn and Baltimore—had rowhouses, but Philadelphia’s were more efficient, plentiful and affordable. More than anything else, the late-19^th century Philadelphia rowhouse propelled Philadelphia to become the Workshop of the World.

In 1893 the world took notice. The Columbian Exposition in Chicago exhibited a single specimen, a two-story “Workingmen’s House” designed by Philadelphia architect E. Allen Wilson. Other models of American housing on display included an Eskimo house and a logger’s cabin. The Philadelphia exhibit in Chicago was so popular, legend has it, that curious visitors wore out the floorboards.

The Philadelphia model was more than a mere solution to a housing problem; it became an effective tool for a modern society. “The two-story dwellings of this city are, beyond all question, the best, as a system, not only owing to the single family ideas they represent, but because their cost is within the reach of all who desire to own their own homes,” glowed a rowhouse proponent in the early 1890s. “They have done more to elevate and to make a better home life than any other known influence. They typify a higher civilization, as well as a truer idea of American home life, and are better, purer, sweeter than any tenement house systems that ever existed. They are what make Philadelphia a city of homes, and command the attention of visitors from every quarter of the globe.”

Between 1890 and 1910 Philadelphia grew from a city of a million to 1.5 million and added miles more rowhouses with ever greater repetition and monotony. Variations of one sort or another added to the city’s grammar of forms. Over time, some rows would be demolished to make way for new schools, while others would have their brick facade veneered with permastone, a literal interpretation of the romantic idea that even in a modern industrialized city, home is castle.

When poet Beth Feldman-Brandt wrote Taking Down the South Street Bridge in 2009, she had no idea how powerfully her final line, “We are used to finding our way among ruins,” resonates in PhillyHistory.

The original South Street Bridge was supposed to be a marvel of Philadelphia’s Iron Age. Giant iron columns, versions of a design innovated by the Phoenix Iron Company of Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, supported sections spanning the Schuylkill River. The manufacturer had hoped for more of a splash in Philadelphia at the Centennial Exhibition in 1876. For the grounds of the first American world’s fair, they proposed a 1,000-foot observation tower. If built, this would be about twice the height of City Hall, then under construction, and about as tall as the Eiffel Tower, started a decade later. Metaphorically, the Phoenix Tower would rise from the ashes of the bitter, bloody Civil War. Had the proposal been approved, the Phoenix Tower would literally have been cast from recycled government military canon. But it wasn’t approved. Instead, the biblical sentiment of beating swords into plowshares would play out at the South Street Bridge, which opened for traffic months before, and miles away, from the Centennial grounds.

Just a few seasons later, the bridge’s columns began to crack. Engineers diagnosed the cause as moisture in the rubble fill packed inside, expanding as it froze. They strapped on a series of iron belts that kept the cracks from spreading, but there wasn’t anything engineers could do to retrofit a design flaw at the bridge’s western approach. Beneath the roadbed, brick arches resting on granite piers which, in turn, rose from hundreds of wooden piles driven into the muddy riverbed. Problem was, in critical places, the piles had been driven down through only fifteen feet of mud, as far as packed gravel.

When the gravel shifted, piles slipped, piers tipped and arches cracked. Then, early one February Sunday morning in 1878, “the crippled arches gave way at the haunches and fell,” as assistant project engineer David McNelly Stauffer later put it. Like dominoes, “arch after arch went down, and the bridge was not much more than a wreck.”  There had been no casualties, but the two-year-old South Street Bridge was now useless.

Having died a year before the bridge was completed, project engineer John W. Murphy wasn’t around to present his side of the story. Stauffer stepped in, blaming “the tremor produced in the piles by travel on the bridge” allowing “percolation of water down their sides.” Stauffer admitted “the ground underlying this approach is an alluvial deposit, treacherous and unstable in character” but defended the project’s construction. “It is a matter of record that the piles under pier No. 2 were from 28 to 30 feet long,” he wrote. Possibly so, but that wasn’t enough to compensate for the fact that the piles under the pier that failed first were only half that length.

Stauffer’s reputation didn’t seem to suffer much, if at all. Before and even after the collapse, he had capitalized on his bridge expertise. He had written of the innovative construction technique (the Plenum-pneumatic process in sinking the cast-iron columns) in the Journal of the Franklin Institute. After the collapse, in a markedly different tone, Stauffer promoted his services for City Council’s investigations in order that “the public may be enabled to form a correct judgment as to the methods actually pursued by the builders.” Later, he continued to boast about the bridge’s successful arches at its eastern approach. Decades later, Stauffer was still in the business, having included tunnels in his repertoire. But he also pursued another passion, collecting historical prints and compiling a four-volume dictionary of their artists. Stauffer’s American Engravers Upon Copper and Steel, published in 1907, soon became a classic research tool.

In all of the discussion of the new, new, South Street Bridge, the collapse of the first South Street Bridge in 1878 drifted from memory. Today, we find some comfort in the claim made of Street Department’s chief engineer and surveyor, that here is “the largest and most complex project in the history of the Streets Department.” It’s bicycle-friendly, pedestrian-friendly and has a wild lighting scheme. But history compels us to ask: does all of this rest on a foundation of solid rock?

“Immediately south of Independence National Historical Park,” wrote historian Louis Mumford  in 1956, “down as far as Lombard Street…is a district that should not be left to time, change and the conflicting aims of real-estate operators. This district has become nondescript—a mixture of seedy residences, lunchrooms, factories, lofts, tombstone-makers’ sheds, old burial grounds and historic churches… This part of Philadelphia is still known as Society Hill, and it still contains many houses that justify the name… rows of elegant dwellings of impeccable craftsmanship, which only need a little loving care to be nursed back to life.”

Mumford imagined more of what was already underway—a sweeping and positive transformation of an inner city when the very term was synonymous with decay.  Philadelphia had discovered its lightning-in-a-bottle solution, the key to Center City’s turnaround and Society Hill’s success. It wasn’t so much about historic landmarks or landmark developments, although these would be part of the mix, but hundreds (and thousands, city wide) of residential properties with age and character where Philadelphians could  make history theirs.

The city planner behind Philadelphia’s array of projects, including this calculus, knew he was onto something. And by November 1964, Edmund Bacon had parlayed success into fame with a TIME magazine cover story featuring his own façade framed by old and new icons of Society Hill. “Renewers of the city want not only to bring people back from the suburbs to shop, but back to town to live,” wrote TIME. “Society Hill is studded with 18^th-century houses and historic landmarks, and Bacon opened up vistas around them by chopping out the factories and dingy warehouses, threading greenery through them and building new houses in harmony with the 18th-century beauties.”

By the fall of 1964, Ford and Mary Jennings had snagged their diamond-in-the-rough at 521 Spruce Street and were well on their way to a state-of-the-art renovation and restoration. As Bacon held forth for TIME, the Jennings’ held hopes that their plans would be approved by the Philadelphia Historical Commission. Construction began shortly after, and soon 521 Spruce was awarded the city’s 289^th historic plaque. The Jennings installed it with pride beside their brand new front door.

If the door wasn’t historic, the doorway was. Five-twenty-one Spruce seemed liked any many other houses in Society Hill—but this one carried an extra-added association with its first resident, John Vallance. In 1792, the year the house was built, Vallance, Philadelphia’s leading artist/engraver was at work on illustrations for America’s first encyclopedia and the famous L’Enfant plan of the soon-to-be-new national capital in Washington D.C.

Twentieth-century Philadelphians had come to expect as much of their past. Everywhere you turned in Society Hill stood something remarkable, but just as remarkable was the success of the neighborhood’s revival. The sheer scale of this turnaround was one of the main reasons why Society Hill earned a place on the National Register as “the first large-scale urban renewal project to plan for historic preservation.”  No single project, or even collection of developments, could have surpassed the crowd-sourced community building achieved in Society Hill in the third quarter of the 20^th century.

But in all this renewal, something special about these gems was getting lost. It had tugged at Mumford in the 1950s when he wrote of the nearby Headhouse at 2^nd and Pine Streets: Here was “a building that should be treated tenderly and remain undisturbed.” An appreciation of the nuances of patina and accrued features  had fallen by the wayside. Now something harsh and hard had replaced it. In the rush to restore, preservationists purged all but the distant past, or a facsimile of it, anyway. Evidence of intervening time, and, by default, the building’s sense of itself—its very authenticity, was compromised. That’s the irony of Society Hill: buildings that had survived in spite of preservation were suddenly being “saved” at the hands of it.

Nuance didn’t have much of a chance as this dynamic played out. At the Headhouse, which underwent restoration as well, a feel for the complex past gave way to a simpler, cleaner, and ultimately less interesting interpretation. At 521 Spruce, and at hundreds of other properties, the elusive patina and the authenticity of acquired age wouldn’t–and didn’t—stand up to the untender restoration aesthetic that came to define Society Hill.